Table of Contents

VOLUME XXIV.1 January - February 2017

Ron Wakkary, Erik Stolterman

Contemporary technology is changing our everyday environments. HCI is no longer only about the individual working in isolation with a computer at a desk. Our homes, workplaces, and public spaces are becoming interactive. Still, it seems as if the “power” to be part of the design of this new…

1. Gushed Diffusers: Fast-moving, Floating, and Lightweight Midair Display Conventional aerial imaging systems are slow because they require a large, heavy setup. We use aerosol distribution from off-the-shelf spray as a fog screen that resists the wind and has high portability. As application examples, we present wearable…

Daniel Fallman

What happened to the Internet of Things? Just a couple of years ago, it was all the rage. IoT experts were highly sought after in the job market; conferences and workshops were being held in its honor; and whole research centers and institutes were formed and reformed to carry…

David Fore

From that phantom vibration to that reflex to grab your own rear, you are responding to the call of The Stack ... From the virtual caliphate of ISIS to the first Sino-Google War of 2009 to the perpetually pending Marketplace Fairness Act, The Stack gives birth to new sovereignties…

Cally Gatehouse

Describe what you made. Feral Screens is an ongoing research through design project that seeks to critically examine urban digital screens and to explore alternative ways of using digital technology to mediate public life. A feral animal is a domesticated species that lives in the wild, often on the…

Uri Kartoun

Google and Microsoft are known primarily for three major services: search, map navigation, and email. One fundamental requirement of a high-quality software service is responsiveness. Google and Microsoft excel in providing fast responses across their services, making the user experience strikingly attractive. User interface (UI) advances obviously make software…

Jonathan Bean

I am not the only one who has found comfort in the Retina display, for the sharper display grants the farsighted a few more hours of screen time before headache sets in. Apple, which trademarked the term to describe displays with pixels that are too small to be distinguished…

Steven Landry

How do you describe your lab to visitors? The Mind Music Machine (tri-M) Lab is an interdisciplinary research group based in cognitive science, human factors, and computer science at Michigan Tech. The mind is our ultimate research theme; music is our language and methodology; machinery is our research tool…

Joshua Tanenbaum, Marcel Pufal, Karen Tanenbaum

Immortan Joe surveys the wretched crowd from his vantage point above the desolate wasteland. Behind him, cool, clean water pools around the enormous pumps that operate at his command. He stands in the opening of a sandstone mouth, with skeletal teeth as parapets. On the two directly in front…

David Siegel

As usability and user research have matured, the emphasis has shifted from championing the concept of user-centeredness to making it happen on a daily basis. For many UX researchers, this can mean functioning tactically, like QA technicians. Even researchers who do foundational user research, which we tend to consider…

Michael Thompson

We’ve all seen them. Colleagues taking turns tapping Post-its of different colors onto the walls of meeting rooms, standing back pensively, then grouping and regrouping them in seemingly arbitrary ways. Over time, those Post-its evolve into tidy little rows and broad columns. Later, they take on a more even…

Stefan Schneegass, Albrecht Schmidt, Max Pfeiffer

Muscle movement is central to virtually everything we do, be it walking, writing, drawing, smiling, or singing. Even while we’re standing still, our muscles are active, ensuring that we keep our balance. In a recent forum [1] we showed how electrical signals on the skin that reflect muscle activity…

Loren Terveen

The events and activities you know and love in the SIGCHI community—the CHI conference, the other 20-plus SIGCHI-sponsored conferences, special workshops, and so on—are all volunteer-driven. Volunteers plan, organize, and run these activities (with great help from professional staff at ACM and vendors). This means that any problems with…

Elizabeth LaPensée, Vicki Moulder

In the following conversation, Vicki Moulder and Elizabeth LaPensée discuss the intersections of game development and LaPensée’s artistic practice. LaPensée’s social impact game Techno Medicine Wheel brings the digital to the land by using QR codes to encourage active engagement with traditional medicinal plants growing in urban spaces. Her…

Katherine Isbister

How do we create wearable computing that truly augments everyday in-person social interaction? In my research group, we are using playful prototypes to tackle this question. Why are we studying games and play? Playgrounds have long been a place for social pleasures and also for working out conflicts among…

Oliver Korn, Alan Dix

With edutainment and serious games, education has often been among the first domains to adopt new interaction paradigms. However, on the technology side, this domain remains conservative: Education is driven not by technology but rather by people. Thus, apart from examples like Moodle, MOOCs, and smartboards, much of HCI’s…

Florian Mueller, Sarah Pell

On March 31, 2015, Sarah Jane Pell left our lab to summit Mt. Everest. Her planning required years of physical and mental training, logistical preparation with expert advisors, and competency in using alpine equipment as well as adventure and media technology. Her goal was to climb to the summit…

Christopher Le Dantec

We take for granted that human-computer interaction focuses on the interfaces and experiences that people have with computing. It’s built into the name of the field, rooted in the human factors and engineering psychology origins of building systems well suited to our perceptual and cognitive abilities. But as a…

Joshua Tanenbaum, Gillian Smith

Intersections of Craft, Fabrication, and Play There is a growing research community exploring intersecting themes of craft, computation, and fabrication. Researchers in this space come from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds: from practicing artists to ethnographers to technologists. All share an interest in incorporating playfulness into their inquiry, using…

Criticality joined with making—critical making—is a provocative topic in interaction design [1,2,3]. During our three-year ethnography of a small Midwestern hackerspace [4], we observed participants who might be described as already on the edges of critical making in their own practice, though they had not heard the term. We…

Anne Sullivan, Gillian Smith

Computer games and traditional handcrafts are seemingly disparate domains, but they share the common property of being inherently playful. Though the playfulness associated with games is obvious, crafting promotes a different kind of play. Hobbyists and professional crafters alike refer to experimentation with color, material, and layout choices as…

Michael Cowling, Joshua Tanenbaum, James Birt, Karen Tanenbaum

There are two competing narratives for the future of computationally augmented spaces. On the one hand, we have the Internet of Things [1], where the narrative is one of making our environments more aware of us and of themselves, and generally making everything “smarter” through embedded computation, sensing, and…

Priscilla Ho

Contributor: Priscilla Ho Curator/Editor: Eli Blevis Genre: Disconnecting, maker culture, well-being, performative objects Apropos of the concept of flow, we may be happier if we spend less time online and more time face-to-face with the people who matter most to us. This interactive tea set allows people to set…